Designing in a university and start-up context: An analysis on engineering change propagation

This paper examines the evolution of change dependencies during an electrical motorcycle design project undertaken by a start-up team. It was found that only 33% of the changes made in the project were planned and change propagation accounted for 20% of all changes made. The findings also suggest that an analysis of direct inter-component dependencies at the start of the project could have prevented (or prepared for) 67% of change propagation. Such detection rate may suffice for resource-strapped start-ups who cannot afford more advanced change analysis.